Biologists' dinner

With 4 fellow biology students we started to have dinners together over 10 years ago. The hostess would prepare the main course and the others would bring starters, dessert and drinks. Even though some of us lived abroad for 1-2 years, we managed to keep up the tradition. Recently we've started cooking together in stead of each preparing her own stuff. Today we were on again.


For starters we had a delicious salad with rucola, pomegranate seeds, cucumber and parmezan, with a dressing made from pomegranate juice, balsamic vinegar and olive oil. After that we had an enormous baked dish with fish, leek, onions, garlic and sour cream. The dessert was an Italian rice tart with apples.


Needless to say that after this meal we could do with a little walk in the countryside for digestion!

Beef stew with quince

Another Claudia Roden recipe called khoreshte beh, which stems from Persia.


Serves 6

2 big onions, chopped
3 tbsp sunflower oil
1 kg beef shoulder (or other meat for stew), in 2,5 cm cubes
1,5 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1oo g yellow split peas, soaked for 1 hr
2 big quince, washed, without core and cut in big slices (with or without skin)
4 tbsp lemon juice
1-2 tbsp sugar

Fry onions in a big pan until soft. Add the meat and fry until it's brown. Add just enough hot water to cover the meat, add spices, pepper & salt, and let simmer for 1 hour.
Add split peas and quince and if necessary more water. Let it simmer for another 30 min, until split peas and quince are cooked. Add lemon juice and sugar 15 min before the end of cooking time.

Notes
You can also use lamb or veal.
I couldn't find the split peas so I used red lentils.
Next time I will fry onions and meat separately, in order to be able to really seal the meat on high heat.
Taste the dish and add more sugar or lemon juice if necessary

Hommos - chick pea spread

Yesterday I had friends over for dinner. As a starter I made hommos, based on a recipe by Jamie Oliver. It's a typical middle eastern dish.


Serves 6

750 g cooked chick peas (drained weight) or 300 g dried chick peas
1/2 tsp cumin seeds, crushed in a mortar
1 tsp red chilli paste (e.g. sambal)
1 garlic clove, crushed
juice of 1-1,5 lemon or 2-3 limes
1 red pepper
3 tbsp pine nuts, roasted
extra virgin olive oil

If you use dried chick peas, soak them overnight in water, then rinse and add fresh water. Bring to the boil, boil uncovered on high heat for 10 min., then cover and let them simmer until they are cooked. This usually takes around 1 hr.
If you buy them boiled, drain and rinse in water.
Crush them in a blender with the lemon juice and some olive oil. Add cumin seed, chilli paste, garlic and pepper and salt. Taste and add some more of any ingredient you think is lacking.
Peel the red pepper. You can cut it in half, remove stem and seeds, put them in a greased oven dish and bake them in the oven for 30 min at 200 °C. Alternatively, you can leave it whole and put it under the grill; let the skin blacken and then turn it over for the next part and so on until the whole skin is black.
When the pepper is baked or grilled, put it in a plastic bag and let it cool for a bit. Then peel it and remove what remains on the inside. The steam in the bag makes it possible to peel them easily.
The flesh should be soft. Cut it in small pieces and add to the hommos.
Decorate the dish with the roasted pine nuts.
Serve with baked pizza crust or pitta bread, cut into pieces.

Notes
You can also add chopped fresh coriander or parsley leaves.
In traditional hommos there is some tahina (sesame seed paste) added. I didn't think of this but I will try it another time.
Claudia Roden keeps the cooking liquid from the chick peas and adds some of this to make the hommos creamy. She also adds red paprika powder.

As a main dish I prepared the spicy lamb and coconut stew (see previous post) and as a side dish spicy root vegetables, another Claudia Roden recipe from her New Book of Middle Eastern Food, posted by labelga. For this last dish I used the original Claudia Roden quantities, perhaps with a bit more Jerusalem artichokes. I left out the chilli pepper since my other dishes were already quite hot. One of my guests suggested the addition of parsnip, which I might try next time.


For dessert I made the Danish apple dessert again (see previous post) and served it with vanilla ice cream. And as a final touch I got some of Brussels best cookies from Dandoy, to go with tea and coffee afterwards.

Today there's finally some sun in Brussels, after weeks of depressing grey and dark winter days. So I had this view while clearing up my kitchen this morning:

You can see the Koekelberg basilique far away in the middle and the white tower on the right is a beautiful concrete church from the 1930's in Molenbeek.

Quinces in wine - cotognata

A few days ago I couldn't resist buying quince (kweeperen, coings, marmelos....). I love this fruit, the smell and flavour are almost like perfume. I meant to prepare a chicken stew with them, but as I already used chicken for the broth, I decided to prepare the quince separately as a dessert.
The recipe by Claudia Roden has already been posted by labelga.


I used red wine, about 200 ml, a cinnamon stick in stead of powder and only 6-7 cloves.
I added a lot of water and also some lemon juice.
When the fruit was cooked, I took it out and left the liquid to cook for another 15 min. It didn't get very sirupy in that time but I like it this way.

Green sauce - salsa verde

This is my favourite sauce. It's like a type of home-made green mustard, served with boiled meat or potatoes. The recipe is Italian.
I make my green sauce based on a recipe from Lorenza de' Medici's 'ITALY The beautiful cookbook'.

Serves 6

50 g parsley, finely chopped
1 tbsp fresh breadcrumbs, soaked in water and then squeezed
1 clove garlic, crushed
2-3 anchovy fillets, finely chopped
1 tbsp capers
1 boiled egg, peeled and finely chopped
1/8 l olive oil, extra virgin
lemon juice to taste
salt and pepper

Mix all the ingredients together except the olive oil. You can use a blender or food processor.
Add the olive oil little by little and incorporate it into the sauce. Maybe you won't need the total quantity mentioned.
Taste it and add some more of any ingredient as you seem fit.

Note: use a very nice quality of olive oil as it determines the taste of the sauce.

Chicken broth

Broth is my favourite dish. My mother used to make it when I was a kid, and I took out the vegetables and ate them first and then slurped the liquid which is so delicious.
Since a few years I've started making my own broth, based on my mother's and her sister's recipe. It's not difficult but you need a lot of time.


Ingredients
1 chicken
2 carrots, peeled and cut in pieces of 3 cm
2 leeks, cleaned and cut in pieces of 3 cm
2-3 branches celery, cleaned and cut in pieces of 3 cm
1 onion, peeled
2 shallots, peeled
3 garlic cloves, peeled
1 turnip, peeled and cut in big pieces
1 parsnip, peeled and cut in big pieces
3 bay leaves
1 tbsp dried thyme (or better: a few branches of fresh thyme)
a few branches parsley
2-3 cloves
8-12 black pepper corns
salt

Wash the chicken and put it in a pan with 2-3 l cold water.
Bring this to the boil.
Take off the froth on medium heat during 5-10 min.
Add the vegetables. Stick the cloves in the whole onion before adding it.
Add parsley and herbs. You can bind them together with cooking thread (this is called 'bouquet garni' in French), so they are easy to take out in the end.
Add whole pepper corns and salt to taste.
Bring this to the boil again.
Then lower the heat and leave it to simmer for 2-3 hrs on very low heat.
Take out the chicken, pour the soup through a sieve into another pan and throw the vegetables and everything else that remains in the sieve away.
Take the skin and bones off the chicken and put the pieces of meat away.
Leave the broth to stand in a cool spot overnight.
In the morning, take off the fat carefully with paper towel.
The broth is now ready for use.

I froze half of the broth and made a soup with the rest.
For this I chopped a few vegetables very finely (1 leek, 1 carrot, 1 potato, 1 onion and 1 turnip). I heated the broth until it boiled, added the vegetables and let them simmer on low heat for 10 min.
You can eat the meat cold or put it back in the soup to heat it.

Notes

You can add a little vermicelli or other pasta in the soup.
I also make this with beef in stead of chicken.
Claudia Roden advises to keep the cooked meat in a little bit of broth.